Eugenio Montale’s Translation of Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato

Here we face a concrete problem of integrity of a very specific textual corpus, namely the 84 poems now forming, after a troubled journey, the so-called Diario Postumo (DP) by Eugenio Montale. Our approach is rather simple to describe: it is based on two distinct methods that measure similarity between texts, namely two different algorithms that given any pair of texts return a positive number which is smaller for similar texts. The first similarity measure, called entropic distance (or lzwe), is based on the use of cross entropy to measure differences between sequences of symbols, as learned from data compression theory. The second similarity distance, called n-gram distance, is also very simple to describe and it is based on the frequency of sequences of consecutive n characters. Both distances have been described elsewhere, but for completeness we report their precise description in the Appendix. The main purpose of our analysis is to test if it is possible, trough purely automatic and quantitative methods, to reveal anomalies in the poems forming the DP. Such anomalies exist and are compatible and coherent with the hypothesis that they are the result of several elaborations of authentic Montale material, originally created and recorded in different forms. Our research on the DP is just a part of a wider research project aimed at exploring the possibility of combining philological qualitative methods with mathematical quantitative approaches to solve problems in authorship attribution (A.A.), forgery detection and integrity texting of textual corpora.

Eugenio Montale, The Coastguard's House, translated by Jeremy Reed; Poems from Mandelstam, translated by R. H. Morrison; Sylva Fischerova, The Tremor of Racehorses: Selected Poems, translated by Jarmila and Ian Milner; Tua Forsstrom, Snow Leopard, translated by David McDuff; Odysseus Elytis, The Sovereign Sun: Selected Poems, translated by Kimon Friar; Luis de Camoens: Epic and Lyric, translated by Keith Bosley was published in Translation and Literature 1 on page 189.

Joseph Addison: The Freeholder. Edited by James Leheny. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1979. xii + 283 pp. £16.00. Joseph Addison: The Freeholder. Edited by James Leheny. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1979. xii + 283 pp. £16.00. Notes and Index to Sir Herbert Grierson's Edition of the Letters of Sir Walter Scott. By James C. Corson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1979. x + 699 pp. £30.00. The Victorians and Ancient Greece. By Richard Jenkyns. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1980. xii + 336 pp. £15.00. Toward the Making of Thoreau's Modern Reputation. Edited by Fritz Oehlschlaeger and George Hendrick. Urbana. Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press. 1980. xx + 413pp. £13.50. Herbert Spencer. By James G Kennedy (Twayne's English Authors Series, 219) Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1978. 163pp. $8.95. T H Huxley: Man's Place in Nature. By James G. Paradis. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 1979. xiv + 226pp. £9.45. Philip Webb and his Work. By W.R. Lethaby. Introduced by Godfrey Rubens. London: Raven Oak Press. 1980. x + 323pp. £12.00. Leslie Stephen: Selected Writings in British Intellectual History. Edited by Noel Annan. (Classics of British Historical Literature) Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1979. xxx + 297pp. £11.90. The Literary Criticism of F.R. Leavis. By R.P. Bilan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1979. viii + 338 pp. £12.50. F.R. Leavis: Judgment and the Discipline of Thought. By Robert Boyers. (Literary Frontiers Editions) Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press. 1978. vi + 122 pp. £3.85. Three Honest Men: Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling. A critical mosaic. Edited by Philip French. Manchester: Carcanet New Press. 1980. 120pp. £6.95. F. R. Leavis: “Reading out Poetry” and “Eugenio Montale ‐ A Tribute,” together with the Proceedings of a Commemorative Symposium on Leavis. Belfast: The Queen's University of Belfast. 1979. 63pp. £2.00

In the autobiographical prose of Eugenio Montale and Tommaso Landolfi , the theme of travel plays a signifi cant role. The development and refraction of this theme is directly related to the concept of home, which is different for these writers. Tommaso Landolfi , leading the life of a hermit in a small provincial town, seeks to travel to large centres full of social life. Eugenio Montale, who was less attached to the family nest, in the latter part of his life lives in Milan. Tired of the burden of fame and the noise of the big city, he sets off for quiet secluded places unlike Italy, where he can fi nally rest. In the works of both writers, travel is closely related to the theme of the game. Tommaso Landolfi , who sees the meaning of human life in the game, combines his travels with «forays into gambling», that is, to the casino. Roulette becomes an opportunity for him to communicate with a higher power, to receive answers to existential questions that torment him. Eugenio Montale travels in disguise, changing masks. In his imaginary game world, he animates objects and makes friends with them. For both writers in their travel, a special role is played by inscriptions and signs, which are perceived by them as secret messages.

Italian twentieth century poetry clearly shows the blurring of the borders between prose and poem. This genre indefinition reveals itself in the majority of authors and poetical trends, reflecting the inclination to open the poetical discourse to new linguistic and formal registers, as well as to new contents, thus getting nearer to the dialects context. Critics have pointed the existence of this tendency in Eugenio Montale. The combination of poetry and prose can be detected not only in his late writings, but also in some texts of his early production.

Eugenio Montale's Poetry: A Dream in Reason's Presence

Thomas Hardy and Eugenio Montale: In mourning and in celebration

Giuseppe Gazzola’s focus on the Montale siblings offers a unique examination of the military experience of the famous poet Eugenio Montale and his three brothers. As Gazzola notes, all four took part in the military operations against the Austrian army on the eastern Alpine sector in the period 1915–1919. Their sister Marianna, in her correspondence with pen friends from different cities, left a remarkable account of this family saga, which becomes even more interesting when we consider that the writer in the family, Eugenio, used to be extremely reticent about his participation in the First World War. In this chapter, Gazzola draws attention to the role of Marianna in recording the story of her family, and reconstructs the war experience of Eugenio Montale and his brothers according to available documents.

E. M. Forster's Passage to Italy

Poesie/Poems by Eugenio Montale. Italian text with English translations by George Kay. Illustrated by George Mackie. Edinburgh University Press, 20s.

This investigation arises in the wake of the existence of promising and not yet examined affinities between Antonio Machado’s detailed notions about landscape and Eugenio Montale’s wide geo-botanical knowledge; he knew and admired Andalusian poet’s work thanks to the reading of Gerardo Diego’s Anthology. The article follows a comparative perspective between the literatures of two “sister” languages and finds its inspiration in the suggestive rhetorical question asked by the Sevillian author: “Nature is only an alphabet / of the poetic language / But, is there a better one?”. The author of Campos de Castilla mentions an extraordinary quantity of wild or cultivated plants with the scientific exactitude of an expert naturalist and shares his “simply love of Nature” (and love towards the simplicity of Nature) with the author of Ossi di seppia; the “poetry of objects” by the Genovese poet, whose selection of vegetables specimens intuits Machado’s clear mark, is oriented towards those rough and rocky landscapes of his native Ligury region that reveal him cosmic values. Both poets share the same detailed look of hic et nunc, analogous descriptive strategies, a stilus miserorum and the description of neo-simbolic paysages de l’âme.

The article focuses on three Italian Novecento poetical voices of Lucio Piccolo, Eugenio Montale and Maria Luisa Spaziani and presents their experience of writing which gesture originates from listening to each other’s voices and from the constant weave with life that nourishes each poetic inspiration and each possible story. Firstly, the authors consider the Sicilian voice of baron Piccolo from Calanovella who was completely excluded from the circle of Italian poets in the XX century, in spite of the promising debut that took place thanks to Eugenio Montale who was convinced of Piccolo’s originality and maturity. Secondly, the analysis of biographical events involving baron Piccolo and his cousin Tomasi di Lampedusa, the epistolary story of 9 lyrics written by the Sicilian aristocrat and his friendship with Maria Luisa Spaziani, should help unravel the mechanisms which generate, inspire and extinguish every act of writing. In its concluding part, the paper explores the conception of «resistance» and «act of creation», as interpreted by Giorgio Agamben.

Review Notices : Eugenio Montale. A Critical Study of His Poetry, Prose and Criticism. By G. Singh. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1973. 297 pp. $15.00

Eugenio Montale, the Italian poet and Nobel Prize recipient, frequently met Pound before World War II and wrote about him and his plight in the 1950s and 60s. The chapter establishes parallels between the careers of the two poets and presents their reciprocal, mostly friendly, relations and views. The chapter is of special use in showing what an astute and canonical Italian intellectual like Montale made of the Pound phenomenon.

Psychoanalytic Nachtraglichkeit appears to be the temporality that structures the canzonieri in morte , that is to say, collections of poems devoted to the poet’s dead beloved. In fact, a similar process of (self)-interpretation that is both retrospective and progressive at the same time can be found much earlier in European poetry. The article starts from certain theoretical reflections and an overview of the two fundamental models provided by Dante’s Vita Nova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere in order to focus on some poems from two contemporary Italian canzonieri in morte : Eugenio Montale’s Xenia (in Satura , 1971) e Milo De Angelis’ Tema dell’addio (2005). The intent is to show how the complex temporality that Freud named Nachtraglichkeit can perform different essential functions: to organize the lyric macro-text; to construct a new meaning for poems previously composed; to reconsider the poet’s own personal and poetic past; and to contribute to the creation of a new author . Certain features delineated in the canzonieri will finally lead to reflect upon the ‘self-anthology’ as a form, that is to say, an anthology of the poet’s work selected and organized by the poet him/herself.